Pixels adds USDC payments after dropping stored store balances

In Brief:

• Pixels (official site) now accepts USDC, founder Luke Barwikowski said.
• The change follows a payments rework he called “just-in-time purchasing,” which stops the game from holding player balances inside its stores.
• USDC now buys vPIXEL directly in game and in the Stacked app, shortening the path between rewards and spending.

Pixels now takes USDC at checkout.

Founder and CEO Luke Barwikowski tied the change to a rebuild of how the game handles money, in remarks posted to X by @rmcorp.

“The reason we’re able to do this is because we introduced this new feature of ‘just-in-time purchasing’ essentially,” Barwikowski said.

The mechanic removes stored value from the storefronts. “Pixels no longer stores your balances inside of these stores,” he said. His description of the current payment flow cuts off mid-sentence in the posted clip, at “The way that payments work right now.”

What USDC buys

In the Stacked app, players can buy vPIXEL with USDC, on-chain PIXEL or Stacked PIXEL. In game, vPIXEL can be bought with USDC or with in-game Stacked PIXEL. The shop sits behind an orange button on the upper left of the HUD, under a Shop tab.

vPIXEL is the non-tradable side of the economy. It’s backed 1-to-1 by PIXEL, and players can stake it or spend it. But they can’t sell it, trade it or send it to another player.

It moves across partner games without transaction fees through Limit Break’s ERC20c. Taking value back out costs a farming fee of roughly 50%, which is redistributed to staking wallets.

Where PIXEL lands

The token is being pushed toward staking and governance. Over roughly a year, PIXEL stops functioning as a reward currency, with USDC taking that role in some contexts.

Pixels has also said it plans a DAO for community governance and a Realms Scripting Engine for third-party developers.

The Stacked layer

Stacked is the rewards and engagement platform underneath all of this. It began as an internal tool and now runs in the main Pixels game, Pixel Dungeons and the early-access title Chubkins.

Barwikowski described it to Blockchain Gaming World editor-in-chief Jon Jordan as “the culmination of everything we’ve been working on at Pixels for the last four years, baked into one product.”

The platform was built on four years of Pixels operations, more than $25 million in revenue and one million daily active users. Rewards pay out in USDC for the crypto audience, or in Stacked points that cash out to gift cards or PayPal for U.S. dollars.

Barwikowski has described sending targeted offers to specific user segments: retaining users, re-engaging “lapsed spenders,” and converting players into first-time purchasers to lift lifetime value. He framed it as closer to a loyalty or cashback system than a crypto reward program.

Background

Pixels was founded April 1, 2020 in San Francisco and runs on Ronin, which migrated from an Ethereum sidechain to an OP Stack Layer 2 on May 12, 2026, with about 10 hours of mainnet downtime.

The studio has spent the past year steering away from raw daily active adventurer counts toward users with higher lifetime value, directing resources at players more likely to spend and hold tokens. Pixels Pals, a pet-themed game, was slated for a June or July launch, and the studio has explored partnerships with developers including Runiverse to extend PIXEL utility.

The spending base is already there. “We hit $20 million in revenue in 2024, and it’s all from in-game purchases,” Barwikowski told CCN.